This 'Scandal' Star Uses One Ingredient To Make Healthy Food Taste Better

It's easy for celebrities to slap their name on a cookbook cover or attach their personality to a brand, but when Darby Stanchfield talks about her partnership with Pure Leaf, her passion is obvious. The actress, who's best known for playing the president's fiery press secretary on Scandal, teamed up with the tea company to produce a documentary on how the brand harvests its teas in faraway locations. When we caught up with Stanchfield, she told us all about the perfect-for-her trip — "I'm from the middle-of-nowhere Alaska and they took me to a tea estate in the middle-of-nowhere Indonesia!" — her favorite food memories, and the salad dressing she can't stop making.

Courtesy of Pure Leaf

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She drinks tea — and cooks with it.

Since Stanchfield returned from her trip, she's not only been drinking iced tea nonstop (it's her go-to on set), she's been adding the stuff to all kinds of meals and drinks. "I was so inspired by the cuisine there, so I came up with some recipes that incorporate the tea to celebrate it," Stanchfield says. You can make her turmeric and coconut quinoa, a nasi goreng (fried rice) dish, and a cranberry-mango-kumquat-green tea mocktail (that's begging to be spiked).

Courtesy of Pure Leaf

Darby inherited her green thumb from her grandfather.

You can't go more than a nine-photo grid on Stanchfield's Instagram without seeing something fresh and green. And there's a pretty good chance it was grown in her own backyard. "My grandfather was a really prolific gardener," she says, adding that he also did all of today's trendiest eco-friendly things — recycling, composting, conserving water — before they were considered cool. "As a kid, I used to visit him in Seattle, and I was in awe of the fact that he grew everything under the sun," Stanchfield remembers. Now, she does the same, with a garden full of herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and leafy greens.

Salads are her thing.

And they're anything but boring. Her toppings run the gamut (strawberries, radish, and carrots; beets, buckwheat, and walnuts; and sprouts, tofu, cucumber and blueberries), but her dressing is usually a variation of oil mixed with lemon thyme that's picked fresh from her backyard. The oil and herb combo is a tip she picked up from her grandfather: "I learned from my summer visits with Grandpa that he never used dressing but always lots of herbs," Stanchfield wrote on her Tumblr. "It never disappointed and was always new and interesting."

She's a huge fan of #MeatlessMonday.

The hashtag's not just an excuse to post on social media, Stanchfield insists: "It's one little way that I choose to love the Earth and cut back on my carbon footprint." Nearly every Monday, you can catch some vegetarian-friendly dinner ideas on her Instagram. Keep your eyes peeled for a tea-infused dish that'll hit her feed in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, get inspired by her stuffed bell peppers, veggie pizza bake, and asparagus bisque.

Her on-set meals are so low-key.

Stanchfield is the opposite of those celebrities whose dressing room riders are 20 pages long. "I just like real, simple ingredients that aren't complicated," she says. Sometimes that's tiding herself over with a handful of almonds and an apple as a snack, and she'll often head to the salad bar at craft services for lunch.